Patriot Pyro 120GB SandForce SF-2281 SSD Review

Patriot Fires Things Up with Pyro

Patriot hasn’t been as active in the SSD realm as some other companies, focusing instead on their memory products and USB flash media. Recently they released their Wildfire line of SSDs and they follow that up with another flame related theme in the Pyro line. Each features the popular SandForce SF-2281 controller and a SATA III interface but differ in the NAND flash employed. The Pyro line is the more value oriented drive as opposed to the Wildfire line which sports slightly better max performance specifications in terms of MB/s and IOPS. This small difference in published performance puts them both relatively close together but we haven’t had a chance to get our hands on the Wildfire so we’ll have to save direct comparisons for when one comes across our test bench.

Even without having a similar drive available by the same manufacturer, the number of drives being powered by the SF-2200 controllers is rapidly growing so the
competition is stiff so Patriot is fashionably late to the SandForce party – not the first but far from the last. Sometimes waiting is a good thing because you can learn from the mistakes of others before stepping out onto the ledge with a new product. Given that some other manufacturers have reportedly had quality issues
with their SF-2200 drives, Patriot may have elected to slow things down a
bit to mitigate any such issues. On the other hand, sometimes it’s costly because speed to market is a big factor in terms of sales. Either way, with both the Wildfire and Pyro drives having SandForce controllers, Patriot has jumped in with both feet so to speak. Specifications of 550MB/s max reads and 515MB/s max writes for the Pyro seem to put it right in line with its competitors but will that hold true across the full spectrum of benchmarks?

Patriot has set the pricing at $120, $209 & $449 for their 60 GB, 120 GB and 240 GB drives. This is less than their Wildfire drives which makes sense since the performance is lower as outlined by the specifications below.

Best-in-class ECC protection for longest data retention and drive life.

Power/Performance Balancing

Thermal Threshold Management

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) – Up to 32 commands

ECC Recovery: Up to 55 bits correctable per 512-byte sector (BCH)

Sequential Read & Write Transfer:

240GB & 120GB models; 550MB/s read | 515MB/s Write

60GB model; 520MB/s read | 490MB/s Write.

Max Random Write IOPS:

Up to 85,000 (4K aligned)/240GB & 120GB models

up to 80,000 (4K aligned)/60GB model.

O/S Support: Windows XP / Vista / 7 / Mac OS / Linux

** Capacities stated are unformatted. The total formatted capacity for the
drive will differ, depending on the operating system and file system used.

The overall design of the drive belies the name save for the flame-like orange wisp on the sticker which mirrors the Wildfire design with the aforementioned being red in color. You’d expect with the naming convention that the sheel itself would be a red or orange color but black was chosen. The edges of the top section of the shell are beveled and polished to a shine which is a nice touch. In the packaging, other than the drive, there’s only a pamphlet carrying specification and warranty information. No adapter plate or cable adapters, etc are included which shouldn’t be an issue for most and help keeps the costs down.